The sound of jazz is often brittle, urgent and urban, but the music of the great US jazz composer and bandleader Maria Schneider evokes the glide of birds and the vistas of prairies more than it does the edgy clamour of the streets. As with Pat Metheny and Bill Frisell, and not infrequently Aaron Copland, too, Schneider’s music is about a more innocent and unconflicted America, still hoping that humanity might one day get into the kind of harmony with itself and its environment that she hears in her head.
Following a short, sharp and pithily deconstructivist approach to familiar songs by the inventive London pianist Liam Noble, Schneider’s orchestra opened their London jazz festival gig with the rich themes from her new album, The Thompson Fields – inspired by the composer’s returns to old Minnesota haunts. The softly squeezed accordion intro and swelling brass and flute lines of A Potter’s Song suggested, as Schneider’s compositions often do, a music involuntarily borne on air currents rather than propelled.
Alto saxophonist Steve Wilson swept out of the brooding bass clarinet figures and piano arpeggios into a free-jazz burnup on Nimbus, and trombonist Marshall Gilkes and flugelhornist Greg Gisbert gracefully reflected the music’s invitations to improvise with patience as well as power on The Monarch and the Milkweed.
The slamming chords of Dance You Monster to My Soft Song (from 1994’s Evanescence) brought a wilder jazz heedlessness, before Lage Lund’s guitar, Frank Kimbrough’s delicate piano and the flaring brass delivered the title track from The Thompson Fields. Saxophonists Donny McCaslin and Scott Robinson cut loose on the strutting Birds of Paradise, and a recitation of the Ted Kooser country poem Walking By Flashlight ushered in an ethereal encore.
Schneider likes quoting Theodore Roosevelt’s words: “There is nothing more practical in the end than the preservation of beauty.” On this gig, that aspiration seemed as close to fulfilment as jazz gets.
• Maria Schneider is at Symphony Hall, Birmingham, 19 November and at CBSO Centre, Birmingham, 20 November. Box office: 0121-345 0600. The EFG London jazz festival runs until 22 November.
